The FAAM Airborne Laboratory [1] is an atmospheric science research facility. It is based on the Cranfield University campus alongside Cranfield Airport in Bedfordshire, England. It was formed by a collaboration between the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in 2001.
FAAM was established jointly by the Natural Environmental Research Council and the Met Office. Initial funding was provided to prepare an aircraft for instrumentation. The main aircraft used is a modified BAe 146-301 aircraft, registration G-LUXE, owned by NERC and operated by Airtask. [2]
Work carried out by FAAM includes
FAAM is staffed by a mixture of NERC, University of Leeds and Met Office personnel, and acts as a servant to numerous UK and occasionally overseas science organisations; primarily the Met Office itself, or UK universities funded by NERC.
It flies around 400 hours annually, most commonly on large campaigns where a team of typically 30 will spend around a month at a base location, potentially anywhere in the world, delivering a specific science campaign, although some flying from Cranfield also takes place.
An emergency response role exists, which has been used three times - at the 2005 Buncefield fire, the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption and 2012 Total Elgin gas platform leak: after Eyjafjallajökull a new aircraft, MOCCA - the Met Office Civil Contingency Aircraft, has been commissioned as the "first responder" to British volcanic ash emergencies.
The facility was originally established in 2001, with an intended operating base of the BAe site at Woodford, in Cheshire. However, by 2004 when the aircraft was delivered, BAe had decided to close Woodford, so eventually the facility was re-sited at Cranfield, although it initially had limited involvement with that university, the largest university customers being Manchester, Cambridge, Leeds and York. Since 2016 FAAM has been co-located in a new dedicated building with a new department of Atmospheric Informatics of Cranfield University, and its involvement with Cranfield is becoming closer.
From 2008 - 2014 FAAM was headed by Dr. Guy Gratton, an aeronautical engineer; it is now headed by Mr Alan Woolley, an instrumentation scientist.
A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for measuring atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasts and to study the weather and climate. The measurements taken include temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and precipitation amounts. Wind measurements are taken with as few other obstructions as possible, while temperature and humidity measurements are kept free from direct solar radiation, or insolation. Manual observations are taken at least once daily, while automated measurements are taken at least once an hour. Weather conditions out at sea are taken by ships and buoys, which measure slightly different meteorological quantities such as sea surface temperature (SST), wave height, and wave period. Drifting weather buoys outnumber their moored versions by a significant amount.
The Meteorological Office, abbreviated as the Met Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and is led by CEO Penelope Endersby, who took on the role as Chief Executive in December 2018 and is the first woman to do so. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.
Eyjafjallajökull, sometimes referred to by the numeronym E15, is one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, north of Skógar and west of Mýrdalsjökull. The ice cap covers the caldera of a volcano with a summit elevation of 1,651 metres (5,417 ft). The volcano has erupted relatively frequently since the Last Glacial Period, most recently in 2010, when, although relatively small for a volcanic eruption, it caused enormous disruption to air travel across northern and western Europe for a week.
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a British research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences.
Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) is a rocket launch site on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, United States, just east of the Delmarva Peninsula and approximately 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Norfolk. The facility is operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and primarily serves to support science and exploration missions for NASA and other Federal agencies. WFF includes an extensively instrumented range to support launches of more than a dozen types of sounding rockets; small expendable suborbital and orbital rockets; high-altitude balloon flights carrying scientific instruments for atmospheric and astronomical research; and, using its Research Airport, flight tests of aeronautical research aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), a federal research laboratory, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), located in Miami in the United States. AOML's research spans tropical cyclone and hurricanes, coastal ecosystems, oceans and human health, climate studies, global carbon systems, and ocean observations. It is one of seven NOAA Research Laboratories (RLs).
Cranfield Airport is an airfield just outside the village of Cranfield, in Bedfordshire, England. It is 7 NM south-west of Bedford and 5.5 NM east of Milton Keynes. It was originally a Second World War aerodrome, RAF Cranfield. It is now used for business aviation, private flights, and for research and development activities.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is the United Kingdom's national polar research institute. It has a dual purpose, to conduct polar science, enabling better understanding of global issues, and to provide an active presence in the Antarctic on behalf of the UK. It is part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). With over 400 staff, BAS takes an active role in Antarctic affairs, operating five research stations, one ship and five aircraft in both polar regions, as well as addressing key global and regional issues. This involves joint research projects with over 40 UK universities and more than 120 national and international collaborations.
Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) is a nonprofit government contractor owned by Utah State University. SDL was formed in 1982 from the merger of Utah State University's Electro Dynamics Laboratories and the University of Utah's Upper Air Research Laboratory. The corporation has been responsible for the design, fabrication, and operation of sensors on over 430 payloads ranging from aircraft and rocket-borne experiments to space shuttle experiments and satellite-based sensor systems. SDL is the Missile Defense Agency's University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) and one of 14 UARCs in the nation. SDL provides sensor systems and supporting technologies to address challenges for the United States government. SDL designs and develops electro-optical sensors, builds small satellites, provides calibration services, and creates real-time data reconnaissance systems.
TAMDAR is a weather monitoring system that consists of an in situ atmospheric sensor mounted on commercial aircraft for data gathering. It collects information similar to that collected by radiosondes carried aloft by weather balloons. It was developed by AirDat LLC, which was acquired by Panasonic Avionics Corporation in April 2013 and was operated until October 2018 under the name Panasonic Weather Solutions. It is now owned by FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd.
Francis Alfred Wilson, FRMetS, CMet, is a Scottish-born weather forecaster, from Buckinghamshire, who was a presenter and the Head of Weather on the BBC's Breakfast Time and Breakfast News from 1983 until 1992, and Sky News from 1993 until 2010.
Over the last two centuries many environmental chemical observations have been made from a variety of ground-based, airborne, and orbital platforms and deposited in databases. Many of these databases are publicly available. All of the instruments mentioned in this article give online public access to their data. These observations are critical in developing our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and issues such as climate change, ozone depletion and air quality. Some of the external links provide repositories of many of these datasets in one place. For example, the Cambridge Atmospheric Chemical Database, is a large database in a uniform ASCII format. Each observation is augmented with the meteorological conditions such as the temperature, potential temperature, geopotential height, and equivalent PV latitude.
The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) is a research institute where scientists study the use of data from geostationary and polar orbit weather satellites to improve forecasts of weather (including tropical cyclones and severe storms. CIMSS was formed through a Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. CIMSS parent organization, the Space Science and Engineering Center is a primary developer and operator of environmental satellite technologies.
Meteorological instruments, including meteorological sensors, are the equipment used to find the state of the atmosphere at a given time. Each science has its own unique sets of laboratory equipment. Meteorology, however, is a science which does not use much laboratory equipment but relies more on on-site observation and remote sensing equipment. In science, an observation, or observable, is an abstract idea that can be measured and for which data can be taken. Rain was one of the first quantities to be measured historically. Two other accurately measured weather-related variables are wind and humidity. Many attempts had been made prior to the 15th century to construct adequate equipment to measure atmospheric variables.
Chesapeake Light is an offshore lighthouse marking the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. The structure was first marked with a lightship in the 1930s, and was later replaced by a "Texas Tower" in 1965. The lighthouse was eventually automated and was used for supporting atmospheric measurement sites for NASA and NOAA. Due to deteriorating structural conditions, the lighthouse was deactivated in 2016. At the time, it was the last remaining "Texas Tower" still in use due to obsolescence.
Between March and June 2010 a series of volcanic events at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland caused enormous disruption to air travel across Western Europe.
The National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) is part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and looks at improving knowledge of the planet by taking Earth observations from space and aircraft, as well as from the ground, to produce models which will help understand, respond and adapt to climate and environmental changes.
Fennec is a large-scale, international, multi-institutional, multi-platform, observational, modelling and satellite climate program in the Saharan Heat Low region. The Saharan Heat Low is a key component of the West African Monsoon and is the location of the largest mineral aerosol loadings on the planet in the northern summer. The inhospitable, vast area of the Heat Low has virtually no routine meteorological observations. Knowledge of the key atmospheric processes in this important region is therefore very limited and this knowledge deficit results in reduced performance of both weather and climate prediction in and well beyond the north/west African region. The Fennec project is designed to address this knowledge deficit. It is the first major climate program in the central Sahara. The ideas for Fennec, which is a British, French and German initiative, grew out of the African Multidisciplinary Monsoon Analysis (AMMA). Fennec is the project name – it is not an acronym.
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Tamsin Alice Mather is a British Professor of Earth Sciences at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford and a Fellow of University College, Oxford. She studies volcanic processes and their impacts on the Earth's environment and has appeared on the television and radio.
